Setting up Health City, in a pact with Ascension.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: Dr. Devi Prasad Shetty, a famed physician and humanitarian in India, is leading the charge to create a state-of-the-art hospital center in the Cayman Islands.
Shetty is behind Health City, a huge healthcare facility that will offer tertiary care and stand as a Center of Excellence for cardiology, cardiac surgery, and orthopedics. Additionally, it will offer top-of-the-line care in open-heart surgery and angioplasty, neurosurgery, and knee and hip replacement operations.
And the best part of all? Its affordability, since procedures at health city will cost only around 40% of what they would in the US.
Shetty has been on the leading edge of affordable healthcare in India. He founded Narayana Hrudayalaya (NH) – a Bangalore-based hospital chain that is one of the largest in India – in 2001. NH operates in 12 cities across India, with 5,000 beds under its care currently and plans to expand to 30,000 beds by 2020.
Shetty and NH teamed up with Ascension Health Alliance (now called just Ascension) on April 4th of last year. After shopping around his initial idea for Health City to multiple potential investors, he found in Alliance a partner that had “common philosophies and goals about the future of healthcare,” said Gary Fendler, a spokesperson for Ascension, to The American Bazaar.
Ascension is the largest Catholic and non-profit health system in the US. It employs 121,000 people in 1,400 locations and 21 states across the US and Washington, DC, and provided $1.2 billion in healthcare services over the course of 2012.
Taking on a co-partnership in the costly endeavor of creating Health City was the first time Ascension has ever done something like this.
“It is the first [venture] of its sort for us,” said Fendler, without ruling out the possibility that there could be more such enterprises from Ascension should Health City prove financially successful.
The Health City will cost about $2 billion to build on a 200 acre site. Construction started in August of 2012, and the planned date of opening is sometime in February of 2014, with 15 phases planned for gradual rollout over the next several years. In addition to the hospital side of it, Health City will also include “an educational facility, a biotech park, and an assisted living community.”
NH’s involvement will be to “provide technical input and direction to the Cayman team,” while Ascension will be responsible for “providing facilities planning, supply chain management, and biomedical engineering services.”
Fendler also talked about how Health City has been constructed with a keen eye towards business from the US, saying that the facility “has been established specifically for the Cayman Islands, neighboring Caribbean islands, and the [United] States.”
Born in Mangalore in 1953, Shetty became inspired to become a doctor when he heard about the world’s first ever heart transplant, which occurred when he was just in fifth grade. He completed his post-graduate work in general surgery at Kasturba Medical College and then learned cardiac surgery at Guy’s Hospital in the UK. Over the course of his medical career, he has purportedly performed over 15,000 cardiac operations. Apart from his professional work, he has been a champion for widespread healthcare reform and affordability in India, such as by creating the Yeshavini health insurance program, which allows farmers in his home state of Karnataka to purchase health insurance for as little as 10 rupees a month.
For his work, Shetty has been awarded the Padma Bhushan (2012) by the government of India, and he has also received awards from Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship (2005) and Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year award (2003).
To contact the author, email to deepakchitnis@americanbazaaronline.com